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Wednesday, 17 January 2007

Coffee Kaya Muffins

It was very nice of my friend, who also loves baking, to lend me one of her muffin cookbooks. I wanted to try out this jam-filled muffins, but realised that I didn't have any yogurt in the fridge. In the end, I used a recipe from another cookbook, which is quite similar and I have all the ingredients on hand. The original recipe is called the strawberry cheesecake muffins. Instead of using strawberries and cream cheese, I used kaya spread (a sweet spread, made from coconut milk, egg, sugar, and pandan leaves) for the filling. As I only have a coffee flavoured milk in my fridge, I turned the recipe to coffee kaya muffins.

I made two versions of the muffins. One with kaya filling, the other with some chocolate chips. I used 2 different paper liners to help differentiate the two. To my amazing, despite baking them at the same time, with the same batter, the effect was totally different! The chocolate chips muffins in the cupcake liners almost "exploded", while the kaya ones looked rather flat.

When I first looked at this muffin, it reminded me of souffles...something which I would want to try out someday...

With my mix-and-match recipe, the muffins turn out to be very moist and fluffy. The muffin is not sweet, but the sweetness from the kaya and chocolate chips balanced off the taste just nice. My niece who came to visit us liked the muffins very much. I gave her a few to bring home for breakfast tomorrow. She told me she likes my almond biscuits, but she would rather eat them plain, i.e., without the almonds!

Hi Fion, very likely that you have over mixed the batter. The batter should be very lumpy, you just need to give a few quick stir with a spatula or wooden spoon. Another possible cause will be the oven temperature, do make sure your oven has been preheated, and do use an oven thermometer.

Hi, I am drooling all over just looking at the photo. Sure miss the good ol' kaya as I can't find any here in Istanbul. I have bookmarked you and will try your baking recipes soon. Most of them made it to my "must bake list". Haa. Thanks for sharing all the recipes.

Hi HHB, any idea why the muffins with kaya spread did not rise? Is it normal that muffins filled with spread or jam can't rise tall when baked? I experimented making muffins with jam filling before but they turned out rather flat..

Hi Christine, I think for my case, it is because of the type of paper liner I used. I have been using muffin paper cups since, and I always manage to get muffins that rise tall with a nice dome even for muffins with jam. Those paper liners for cupcakes yields flatter muffins. Also, till now, I do not own any muffin pans, I used an old hand me down pan with very shallow holes, so I think it could also be the reason why.